What is it, really?
Researchers distinguish several kinds of memory. "Working memory" is the mind’s whiteboard: where you hold a phone number until you dial it, or the start of a sentence until you reach its end. Research suggests its capacity is quite limited: roughly three to five items at once in adults (Cowan, 2010).
Alongside working memory sits long-term memory, which holds faces, names, routes and events. Moving material between the two, from whiteboard to archive, is exactly what classic memory tasks exercise.
How researchers measure it
One of the best-known laboratory tasks is the N-Back, first introduced in 1958 (Kirchner): you watch a stream of items and, each time, decide whether the current item matches the one shown one step earlier, two steps earlier, and so on. Other tasks test recall of pairs (a name and a face, a location and a shape) or reconstruction of sequences. The games in our memory section are built around those same principles: "N-Back Challenge" is a genuine N-Back, and "The Name Café" is built around name-and-face pairs.
What it looks like day to day
In daily life it sounds like this: "Where did I put the keys?", "What’s the new neighbour’s name?", "What was I asked to bring from the shop?". These are precisely the situations memory research studies.
About the research
A central review of the working-memory model: how the mind holds and manipulates short-term information.
Baddeley, A. (2003). Working memory: looking back and looking forward. Nature Reviews Neuroscience.
How many items do we really hold in mind at once? The research points to three to five.
Cowan, N. (2010). The Magical Mystery Four: How is Working Memory Capacity Limited, and Why?. Current Directions in Psychological Science.
The paper that first introduced the N-Back task, which our "N-Back Challenge" game is built on.
Kirchner, W. K. (1958). Age differences in short-term retention of rapidly changing information. Journal of Experimental Psychology.
This page explains how researchers define and measure this ability. It is not medical advice and not a promise of training outcomes.
Games built around Memory
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